


sunlight sunlight sunlight

by putanauhere



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Character Death, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-27
Updated: 2019-10-27
Packaged: 2020-12-28 02:08:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21129017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/putanauhere/pseuds/putanauhere
Summary: Stood on the sand-dusted pavement, Boris had popped open an umbrella and said, “I don’t like the sun,” but it wasn’t then.It was in the car, driving through Hell’s Kitchen - Theo had laughed and said, “I’m a ‘vampire’ too,” his fingers crooking quotes around the word in the air.“What is this?” Boris had laughed back, mimicking the gesture over and over until everything he said over the next twenty minutes had read like sarcasm, like a figure of speech.It was in the hall outside the ballroom, Boris standing in front of an ornate mirror he wasn’t reflected in, and at the time Theo’s mind had worked too fast around the details of getting his painting back to think much of it, other than a passing thought that it couldn’t have been a mirror then, but rather an empty frame to enclose around Boris until he became a painting himself.[Or Theo loses his life in Amsterdam, so Boris gives him another.]





	1. IOU

**Author's Note:**

  * For [p3trichor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/p3trichor/gifts).

> thanks to [amy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/p3trichor) for literally everything on this earth and beyond it  
thanks to aneurin barnard for obvious reasons  
thanks to hozier for the tune
> 
> this is a mix of book and movie compliant because why not. the warnings for character death (one temporary, some not, some original characters, some not) and suicidal thoughts are in line with canon because Amsterdam. there is a vampire au's worth of blood in here. please let me know if i can answer any questions.

_What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted?_

\----

He dies in a hotel room in Amsterdam, in a pool of his own blood gathering at his spine, the smear of Boris’ blood at his lips. 

He barely remembers how he’d gotten there, the last hour of his life skipping like a poorly preserved film reel. He remembers the leather of the briefcase that held his painting and the thought that he’d be able to breathe at last, that his world that had been shifted sideways righted itself once more. Then there was light and fear and threats and a building pain in his gut that for once wasn’t born from fear or guilt or anxiety, but rather burning, twisting metal tearing him up from the inside out. There was the Chinese kid slipping away in the darkness with the only thing that had brought light and the rough smell of leather where his face pressed into the passenger seat of Boris’ car and the high panicked sound of the concierge as Boris made his excuses about the excess of wine, weed, women.

“You have to _walk,_” Boris insists, his arm looped around Theo’s back as he half drags him down the corridor. Theo doesn’t know if he agrees with that assessment, his feet stumbling, largely useless; he doesn’t know if he has to walk or do anything because the thought of collapsing is too enticing to dismiss immediately.

Boris slips his hand casually into Theo’s pocket once they’re out front of the hotel room door, like there’s no part of Theo’s body that’s off limits to him, and fishes out the leather wallet that holds his room key. Theo is laid out on the bed fully clothed, limbs tangled until Boris yanks them straight, eyes fuzzy before and after Boris takes off his glasses and sets them on the bedside table. 

As Boris peels away his coat, his shirt, his undershirt, it feels as though layers of Theo’s hard skin are being pulled back, exposing the softness within that’s always been too vulnerable to show anyone. Boris being who he is has no qualms about this; he always takes what he needs from Theo, without asking, and so far, there has been nothing in the world Theo can do to stop him. 

When Theo tilts his eyes down to look at the oozing mess his stomach has become, he’s jolted at once onto the slab, into _The Anatomy Lesson_, Boris his assessing surgeon, and this image alone hurts worse than the bullet. Theo closes his eyes, but it’s still there, burned into the back of his eyelids, like this painting could possibly ever edge out the one he has permanently installed at his core.

A rough swallow turns into a gag, which turns into an ugly dark cough that leaks blood down the side of his cheek. His eyes open again to the feeling of Boris’ hand swiping it away.

Boris’ mouth hangs open, his jaw working over air like he’s the one in pain. 

“It’s not so bad, Potter, you know, I have seen worse.” His voice is tight though, with the lie. _Boris_, Theo wants to answer, _I’m dying_, but he knows Boris knows.

For as much thought as Theo had put into dying, he hadn’t thought it would be this performative. He hadn’t thought he would live a Greek tragedy, helplessly bleeding out with someone crouched over his body, hand to his cheek. He had thought of his parents, dying instantaneously and alone, and had figured it would be genetic.

Boris climbs onto the bed, jostling Theo like it doesn’t matter that ugly, pained gasps leave his lips, until he’s pressed against Theo with an arm thrown over his waist, his fingers resting in the bloody mess of his hip, in a mirror of their teenaged selves. 

“Theo,” he says firmly, as though he’s maybe said it a few times before unanswered, and Theo looks up at him. Boris’ face swims, his brows locked and his lips still parted and twisted with effort. “I’m going to help you, okay, I owe you.” 

Theo remembers the last time Boris had said that, only a week or so ago. He’d had Theo pressed against the brick wall outside the bar, waiting for his car and his _fucking driver_. Theo had the weight of admitting aloud for the first time that he wasn’t happy pressing firmer onto his chest than the weight of Boris’ embrace.

_I owe you_, Boris had said, before his lips pressed firmly against Theo’s neck, right at the pulse point he’d favored as kids, right where he’d sucked ugly bruises because he thought the look of them was funny or maybe because he’d wanted Theo to have bruises that matched his own. Theo would have taken the bruise, if that was all that was on offer, a souvenir for the present that happily echoed the past, but Boris nipped at him twice like a warning, before his teeth broke the skin at Theo’s neck and it felt like Theo was surrendering over some part of his soul to Boris, pumping unbidden from Theo’s veins and spilling over into Boris’ mouth.

“Fuck,” Theo had said, shoving at him until it felt like his teeth dislodged. It hurt and he tried to work himself toward anger, but his face was still stuck on the drunken, near permanent elation that had come with seeing Boris again. “You’re fucking wasted.”

“Yeah,” Boris had said, licking gently at Theo’s neck, which Theo allowed only because it somehow soothed the burn. Boris’ hands went to his own face as he turned a slow three-sixty. By the time he had rotated back to Theo, his eyes looked as vodka-soaked as Theo thought they should have and his teeth looked too white to be real.

Theo releases another part of his soul to Boris again in the hotel room in Amsterdam, and his natural instinct is to fight back, to claw at Boris’ arm over his waist and dig his nails in, to release broken, pleading sobs, but there’s nothing that can stop Boris once he’s gone after what he wants.

Theo doesn’t know if he can physically hear his heart slowing, or if he just wants to hear it, because it means it’ll be that much closer to over. It beats loud in his ears, pulsing out across the room, and in the long stretches of silence between its next pointed thumping, Theo can hear grotesque slurping and swallowing, the same unpretentious and unrepentant noises reverberating back through time from Boris inhaling soup at Theo’s kitchen table. 

When Boris pulls away, it doesn’t feel like a mercy. His mouth is stained, like he’s back at the playground, pressing Theo’s bloody knuckles to his lips. His eyes are darker than Theo has ever known them, even on his worst nights, pupils fully blown out - it’s a wild and macabre look, one that makes him seem feral, inhuman.

_Why didn’t you just kill me_, Theo wants to say. He was dead when he couldn’t pull the trigger first, when he hit the side of Boris’ car hard, when the bullet was an unstoppable force that proved Theo wasn’t an immovable object. He was dead when he lost his painting a second time and this time had the pleasure of watching it go.

Boris’ arm slips out of Theo’s weak grasp and comes up to Boris’ mouth where he rips at the skin with his bloodstained teeth. The blood living under Boris’ skin oxidizes a dark, near black color. He looks satisfied with it. “Is nearly there.”

“Boris,” Theo manages to say, but Boris shushes him by pressing his wrist to Theo’s mouth. 

“You have to drink, okay,” Boris says, but it’s not the firm instruction that he usually barks out, it’s desperate. For the first time that day, Theo doesn’t listen to him. Boris swears, first in what Theo thinks is Russian, then a translation, “Goddammit, Potter.”

Theo expects it to taste like rust, poison, bitter, warm, but Boris’ blood runs as cold as his skin does and tastes like ambrosia. Boris doesn’t have to hold Theo’s mouth open for long, when Theo’s tongue trails over the bite looking for more. It hits his veins in the form of sedation, a chill preceding total numbness better than anything he had ever taken from Jerome or Xandra. 

“That is good,” Boris tells him when he decides Theo’s done. There was once a thrill to have Boris’ approval, but it feels sour now. “You need to listen to me now. Stay here. I’m going to take care of this. Of everything. Okay? You stay here. Do not leave the room. Do not open the curtains. I’ll.” He breaks off, his eyes flicking down to Theo’s bloody, gasping mouth, before they find Theo’s eyes again. “I’ll bring you something to eat. Okay? It’s okay.” 

Theo keeps his eyes trained on Boris’; through the shadows creeping in at the edges of his eyes, he can tell Boris’ lips are still moving, telling lies about the future he wants desperately to convince Theo is real but can’t. He’s still curled along Theo’s body, holding him like he’s waiting for Theo to fall asleep again, hand pressed firmly over Theo’s heart like he means to defibrillate it.

Theo doesn’t die quickly, but with his last thoughts, he tries to convince himself it’s not so bad that he didn’t die alone.

\--

First it’s black. Then grey. Then white. 

Blinding white light and a pure buzzing in his ears that mutes the world tells Theo he’s been here before, lying on his back, waiting for the dust to settle. He wheezes just as he did then, desperate attempts at catching breaths that lay just out of reach, keeping him empty. His throat burns dry nonetheless, each swallow and failed breath like the slow, painful drag of sandpaper against his esophagus. 

It takes three blinks for him to realize he’s not in the museum. Three blinks to dig his fingers into the present, or maybe the omnipresent.

He’s never put much stock in the idea of heaven and hell, except to wonder if his mother would be behind one door and his father the other. Of purgatory, he hadn’t pictured crown molding or dark, gold-embossed wallpaper, or his clothes strewn along the wooden desk where he’d left them. It must be hell, honestly, because in that moment, Theo can think of no crueler punishment than to confine him to his deathbed in Amsterdam, all of his strings left untied.

It must be failure gnawing at the insides of his stomach, and he knows the judgment that awaits him may not all be his sins but also what he’s left behind. He has his own list for a reckoning, filtering through each line item in mind and practicing his apologies - _sorry for the Goldfinch and for Hobie and for Pippa and for my mother and the gun and a decade’s worth of time wasted. _Most of it sounds genuine to his ears if he doesn’t focus on it too hard, and that’s only as much as he’s ever been able to do. His life flashes before his eyes in such vivid detail he must really be dying, though he’d have put money on the fact that he should have already done so.

His fingers trace slowly across his chest, down his torso until they skim over the rough skin where the blood has stained thick and brown. The excavation doesn’t uncover the wound, Theo’s eyes shifting down to confirm that his skin has healed over smooth once more. He thinks blandly the bullet must still be inside him, a permanent souvenir. 

When he slowly pulls himself up, he half expects his body to remain laid out on the bed, his incorporeal form rising from it, but he remains in one piece. He feels lightheaded, like his insides have gone hollow and all that’s left of him is the acid in his stomach and his sandpaper throat. He’s weak on his feet, but manages a slow shuffle to the bathroom after he lets his coat drop off his shoulders to crumple at the floor - no need to hang it now anyway.

He leaves the lights off, but the tiles on the floor are still a blinding bleach white to his sensitive eyes. When he looks up at the mirror, it’s empty, a funhouse trick. He presses both of his hands to his exposed chest to gauge how solid he feels. 

“What the _fuck_,” Theo says, stumbling backwards until he lands hard on the ground, the thin rim of the claw-footed tub cutting harshly at his back. It would have knocked his breath away if he’d had it, but it does knock sense into him, binds him back down to the earth. He rubs a hand over his mouth, dried blood flaking off as he goes, and he can’t tell if it’s his own coughed up in his slow death or Boris’, cold and dark and lifeless. After that, time loses its meaning in a different way as truth filters in.

Stood on the sand-dusted pavement, Boris had popped open an umbrella and said, “I don’t like the sun,” but it wasn’t then.

It was in the car, driving through Hell’s Kitchen - Theo had laughed and said, “I’m a ‘vampire’ too,” his fingers crooking quotes around the word in the air. 

“What is this?” Boris had laughed back, mimicking the gesture over and over until everything he said over the next twenty minutes had read like sarcasm, like a figure of speech.

It was in the hall outside the ballroom, Boris standing in front of an ornate mirror he wasn’t reflected in, and at the time Theo’s mind had worked too fast around the details of getting his painting back to think much of it, other than a passing thought that it couldn’t have been a mirror then, but rather an empty frame to enclose around Boris until he became a painting himself. 

Theo is alive - or he’s dead but still surviving and the world is still spinning, and Boris still killed those men when Theo couldn’t and his painting is still missing. He was a fool to think he could have gotten off this easy.

On the third day he’s left alone, he knows with certainty the sick twist that’s been lingering in his gut is hunger. When someone passes by his door in the hallway, his mouth drops open, lips peeling back with anticipation to expose his teeth, and he clutches that much harder to the bed to stop himself from giving into it. He has redefined rock bottom several times - bunching bloodstained sheets into his mouth and sucking at them in an attempt to take the edge off, barricading the door with the desk in the corner after a barely staved off attack on the woman who delivered the first newspaper, swallowing every pill and drinking every bottle of alcohol in the room to no effect, and now this - gently pulling at the curtain, the folds bunching in one hand as he holds the other out tentatively. 

His skin hisses as a bright strip of sun brands itself across the back of his hand, licking up where his wedding ring would have sat and over the knuckle of his pinky. He plays this game of chicken against the sun, but loses quicker than he wants to because of the sheer, blinding pain of it. Still the thought formulates in his mind, details slowly clarifying under scrutiny - this is the only choice. 

\--

By the sixth day, he pulls back the curtains ahead of sunrise and leaves the fading moonlight and the streetlamps that line the canal to light his room. He knows moonlight is just sunlight reflected, but somehow he’s exempt from this, like other forms of reflection. 

He dresses in what’s left of his Turnbull and Asser suit, bloodstained and ripped as it is, because he doesn’t know what will be left of his skin afterwards, but if there’s some small mercy he can pay someone by covering it, he will. It’s not about dignity - he’s not sure if it is possible to die with dignity. 

The letters have been written, sad excuses for goodbyes scratched out in shaking penmanship. Boris had left him with nothing - no room key, wallet, passport - but instructions._ Do not leave the room. Do not open the curtains. _Theo hasn’t left, but has still found a way to hell and back on his own, and it’s worse than any bad trip or withdrawal he’s put himself through.

He pulls away the desk at the door so they’ll be able to find him easier and lays himself in bed, too lightheaded, weak on his feet to do much else. The longer he lays there, the heavier he gets, the sinking feeling in his heart weighing heavier and heavier. He couldn’t leave even if he wanted to, and it’s not even the logistics of it - there’s just no telling what he’ll be driven to do once he leaves this room.

So far as he can tell, he’s lost his heart and his mind at once, because if he can’t trust them, they’re of no use to him and he’s of no use to the world. He’s been poisoned, every inch of his body tainted by this thing he’s been forced to become, though he’s wondered, in the early morning hours of the first sunrise since the change, curled in the bathtub for fear of the curtains failing him, if he hasn’t always been this way.

He no longer suspects fate is random; how could it be, when his life feels like a series of punishments for a sin he can’t name, orchestrated with a series of unpredictable crescendos so loud they shatter him into pieces. But he’s been this way since he took the painting, a monster serving another kind of lust, feeding off others to enrich his own life at the expense of everyone else’s security.

Hobie’s voice rings loudest and clearest in his mind - _to lose a thing that should have been immortal_. There had been hope, the thing with feathers, that, coupled with blind trust in Boris he’s never been able to shake, flew him across the ocean, but that’s gone now, and Theo has been granted the immortality that _the Goldfinch_ deserved. He can’t lock himself away in his dark storage unit, waiting forever, and he still can’t turn back time to clip his own chain and fly free. 

He has this - the canal’s reflection starting to ripple brighter across the ceiling like a harbinger, a countdown but Theo doesn’t know how high to start counting from. He wishes he could sleep again, lose hours of his day, his life to unconsciousness because waking hurts too much. He’s never known anyone to die peacefully, slip away in the night to rest - violence is what he knows and what he expects coming to him, what he is owed.

He sees his mother bathed in the faint sunlight that grows slowly across the far side of the room. She smiles at him, haloed in a christlike, Pre-Raphaelite glow, and her smile feels like an invitation. He nearly turns away from her, doesn’t want her to see him like this, for as much as he’s been chasing her his whole life, he can’t bear the thought of disappointing her further. She shouldn’t have to see what he’s become - rotten to the core and two steps away from feral. 

Theo watches her anyway, one last selfish act, and loses himself in the mischievous quirk of her lips like she knows something he doesn’t. Theo pleads with her now the way he pleaded with her then, _tell me tell me tell me the secrets you know of the world, _wondering if he has any of his own to barter with. He should get up and join her, take her hand, ask for her forgiveness, step into the light instead of waiting for the light to come to him, to have his last moment not choosing death, but choosing her. 

But he doesn’t.

The door opens like a statement, knocking against the doorstop with a hard crack, and Theo has never wanted to scream so much in his life or after. Boris shuffles in, ass first, yanking a wheelchair over the threshold until he can just close the door behind them, and when he turns to face the room, his eyes go wide and irritated.

“The fucking curtains are open,” Boris snaps, darting across the room to the window. He wrenches them closed, hissing a swear that hits Theo’s ears as familiar but untranslatable as he risks exposure.

His mother goes with the light, when darkness settles over the room, because she doesn’t belong there. A protest can’t make its way out of Theo’s lips as he sees his only means of escape vanish. Theo’s face twists in disappointment or anger or frustration or all of them. He’s dedicated full days and nights of his life thinking about Boris, wishing for Boris, looking at Boris, like his existence has been coded deep into Theo’s DNA after all this time, but Theo has never wanted him to _fuck off_ more than right this minute, and still the thought hurts him on a molecular level. Boris doesn’t seem to notice, or if he does, he doesn’t care. 

“I brought you something to eat, like I said.” Boris gestures at the thin, listing man in the wheelchair. “Very nearly like the film, yes, the _Weekend at Bernie’s_. You said it was stupid, nobody would believe, I remember, but humans, they fall for this all the time. It’s really embarrassing.”

He hauls the man forward, up and out of his wheelchair until he’s splayed haphazardly over the side of the bed Theo’s left empty. Theo’s fingers curl into the bedsheets as fear and hunger fight their way for dominance within him, his eyes wide and desperate in a way that Boris misreads, or if he doesn’t, he doesn’t care.

“Look at you, you are starving to death,” he says knowingly, dark humor in his voice that sickens Theo. “Thought I would be back earlier, but you know, things happened.” He shrugs, _no big deal_ added in the movement of his shoulder. Boris doesn’t even ask him if he knows - he knows Theo knows what he is now. It feels like another betrayal.

Boris joins him in bed, curling the stranger up against Theo’s side so he can feel his warmth even through their thick clothing. The man - boy, maybe, no more than twenty-one - grunts at being maneuvered around, but doesn’t do anything to fight it. His heartbeat is so slow and deliberate, he’s fucked up on something, maybe even roofied so he won’t put up a fight. 

“Here.” Boris pulls at the man’s shirt sleeve until his wrist is exposed, and holds it up to Theo’s mouth expectantly, waiting like a parent for the baby to open its mouth for a spoon feed. Theo turns his head, his lips brushing at the skin until they’re free of it. Boris remains undeterred, almost excited. “You have to eat, and then I have to tell you something.”

“No,” Theo is finally able to say.

Boris’ face drops quickly, eyebrows pinching together in irritation. “Sit the fuck up and eat something, Potter, you’re almost gone. I see it in your eyes.”

“I don’t want it. I don’t want this.”

Boris looks at his face, the window, then back, and he understands. “The hunger will not kill you, trust me. It will do much worse and then you really will want to kill yourself.”

_Let him starve to death if he wants_, Boris had told Gyuri the last time Theo couldn’t eat something, only last week, when he had anxiety filling his stomach, crawling up his throat, and there wasn’t room enough in his body for potatoes or the rest of the mountain of food Boris had bought him. He struggles to think, then, if Boris had ever actually eaten any of the feasts he’d ordered when they were together in New York or if he’d just pushed plates toward Theo and chanted _eat eat eat_ like a nagging mother.

“This is for you,” Boris says. “I did this for you.”

That’s how it is with them - Boris pushing Theo in whatever direction he wanted, Theo’s feet blindly following after him, mostly because Theo didn’t want to think or be held responsible, so life would be easier but he could also say _look what you made me do_. But there was never any chance of agency here, Theo on his deathbed and Boris truly taking his life in his hands. This is worse than becoming a thief or an addict at Boris’s side ever was. 

“I trusted you.”

Boris starts to work at rolling the boy’s shirtsleeve down, revealing his vulnerable skin, something surgical in his motions. “And I saved your life.”

“You shouldn’t have.”

“Oh, boo hoo hoo,” he sneers, an echo of Theo’s own derision. “You live! This is great! You always assume the worst, always bad, bad, bad. This is not bad thing, I will show you.”

Boris bares his teeth, his teeth that have looked so unnatural for weeks that Theo hasn’t really been able to identify why until now, until he sees them as weapons that sink into the wrist of the strung-out kid and tear at his skin. Blood leaks from his wrist steadily, long wasteful tears that pool at his elbow and make Theo’s gums throb harder. 

Boris’ tongue slides carefully, slowly up his arm to clean the streak of blood and nip at the wound to encourage more blood to slip free. His eyes are closed as he mouths gently around the wrist, and want tugs hard and fast at Theo’s chest and eats up his throat until it works his own mouth open. He presses his hand over his mouth since he can’t seem to close it and fully turns his head away, _jesus fucking christ_.

“Eat, eat, eat,” Boris chants. “Eat and I will tell you about your bird.”

Theo’s head snaps over to him. “What about it?”

He says nothing, just holds the bleeding wrist to speak for him. 

Theo doesn’t look down at the boy, can’t face the thought of looking into his eyes because he doesn’t know which is worse - that he’ll be pleading back to Theo, _please don’t do it_, or that he’ll be too far gone to know the difference. He closes his eyes and puts his lips to the sliced wrist like a gentle kiss, hoping instinct will take over for him and he won’t have to be the one who makes himself drink.

He’s dizzy with it, what he had thought was the rusty tang of blood now oozes sweetly, invitingly, and his teeth tease at the bite as he takes a long pull. It comes so easily, as though it were desperate to escape the vein, like it was Theo’s all along. Theo grips his hands around the boy’s forearm and around the back of his hand, stealing the boy’s warmth as his heart pumps it straight into Theo’s body. 

Theo takes ugly, greedy gulps of him in, the same way he’d sucked in air desperately that one time Boris had nearly drowned him in the pool, until the taste turns sour suddenly and he has to pull away with disgust, his lips smacking like he’s just been tricked into eating a vegetable at age six. He drops the arm, which looks less real, more like a leftover prop from a Romero film, all sheet white and gnawed on. 

When he looks over, he finds the boy’s eyes open and unfocused, an all too familiar emptiness behind them Theo had last seen on Welty. Theo rolls over out of the bed, hitting the carpet unforgivingly hard, his red fingers digging into and staining the carpet. His stomach twists up so much that he begins to retch desperately, but nothing comes out, his body refuses to yield its meal. He’s knocked in the head with whatever the boy had taken, or been given, spinning and lightheaded, too fucked up to start screaming like he should.

He stares up at Boris, a wild challenge in his eyes - _look what you made me do_. 

“It’s okay,” Boris says, pacifying, “I’ll take care of it. I have a system in place for when things like this happens.” Which was the wrong thing to say.

Theo had tried to picture another world in which he could have pulled the trigger and saved his life, justifying it for the law as self-defense, but he still knew in his heart it was indefensible. He doesn’t have an excuse this time. He killed a man in cold fucking blood out of pure need, and if he doesn’t die, he deserves to be locked up.

He inches slowly back toward the curtain, prompting a warning from Boris, “Don’t.” 

Theo’s chest pounds with fear and guilt, mocking his unbeaten heart. Why was he ever afraid of Boris with a gun? They’d become so much together - criminal, loyal, desperate, intimate, broken - and now Boris has made him dangerous. He looks back up at the window and thinks maybe the last thing they should become together is dead.

“Theo.” 

The sound of Boris’ voice brings him back, like an arm bracing around his chest to heave him out of the sinking depths and pull him to safety. Boris’ voice which has acted like a beacon, his north star in pure darkness, the sun whose gravitational pull he is stuck in. It’s Boris’ voice, followed by Boris’ eyes, catching his where he crouches over Theo on the floor, followed by Boris’ hand resting gently on the back of Theo’s neck, nudging him forward so their foreheads press together in something that should be too sacred to belong in this moment. 

“It’s okay,” Boris says, the last words Theo thought he was ever going to hear, both times having the unique quality of Boris speaking them like they’re the truth, and Theo hearing them as a lie. 

\--

Boris had made plans over the last week, same as Theo, but it looks as though Boris will get his way as he usually does. They’ll spend the night at Boris’ flat in Zeedijk while his people _take care of things_ back at the hotel, travel down to Antwerp on Boxing Day, Boris promising lessons along the way until Theo feels acclimated. He chatters on about it excited as Theo strips and slowly dresses in new clothes Boris had waiting for him at the flat, as though there were no conceivable chance Theo wouldn’t make it back here. There’s no flush to his cheeks, no modesty to be found in exposing his bare ass, partly because Boris has seen it before, even if it was a decade ago, and partly because his body doesn’t feel like it belongs to him anymore.

Boris talks about their future together like he’s planning some kind of extended holiday, like they’ll finally travel Europe together like they’d talked about when they were kids, his face falling when he doesn’t see Theo grinning back at him as he does up his jeans. “Always sulking, always this frown with you. You stand here with me, alive, cheating death, your bird is safe, and still you are not satisfied?”

Theo turns from him to look into the long mirror hanging on the wall - an indication that a human lives here, though Theo hasn’t seen her since they’ve arrived. He stares where Boris’ reflection would be, lounging comfortably on the bed behind him, nestled into the lived-in sheets and duvet because Boris never made his bed anyway. If it weren’t for the fact that Theo knows Boris has remained fully dressed, it’d feel too close to a morning after. 

“Is it vampire thing? It’s no big deal. You have now dietary restrictions, it’s like being a vegan, but not obnoxious.”

Theo pulls the cream-colored sweater over his head and adjusts his glasses where they’ve been knocked around a little before turning back to Boris with a challenge. “How can you fucking live like this?” he asks, and he doesn’t mean rules and regulations. 

Boris says what he’d said as a kid, shrugging his shoulders to justify stealing from stores or his dad, “You do what it takes to survive.”

Theo can’t help but disagree. Maybe if the cost is so great, it’s not worth it to survive. Theo has to keep thoughts like that bottled up now because they pinch Boris’ face, they make Boris reach out and give Theo’s head a smack.

“This morning, that was one time thing, no need to drain someone if you eat every day, like humans do. Small meals, they keep you going, you keep them living, everything is hunky dory.” Any other day, Theo would have laughed at the weird way _hunky dory_ works its way around his accent. “I’ll show you when we go out.”

Theo’s mother chose to burden him with life and death, the moment she had given birth and Theo sucked in his first breath and exhaled out a wail. For everyone, the promise of death always hangs in the distance, near or far, or is meant to. 

Boris has given him an afterlife, freedom from death should he so choose. Theo wonders finally, when Boris deems the sun set enough to be safe for them to leave, if this was Boris’ choice for himself, if he’d asked for it because he’d seen an opportunity in it, or if someone had taken pity on Boris three breaths away from an overdose finally conquering him. Theo would place all his money on black, knowing Boris to be as calculating as he seems to have become, that nobody would catch him slipping up these days.

Theo follows him out of the flat, knowing precisely what they’re off to do, even if he doesn’t know how or where. The buildings are thick, piled four stories high, crammed together on either side of the narrow street, the kind of scenes his mother would have loved, purely because they’re the kind of buildings that become immortalized in art. 

He soaks in his first good glimpse of where he is, having been smuggled here in a car with blackout windows earlier in the day by Gyuri, who had been happier to see Theo than he would have anticipated. He’d been curious, in his days alone, who else Boris surrounded himself with might have been a vampire - Gyuri, Miriam, Horst, god knows who else - but Boris seems to be the only one, maybe to maintain control, dominance. Maybe Boris thinks it means something that he’d only keep Theo at his side.

The lessons start then. Boris waves Theo off when he frantically shushes Boris for talking so loud on a tourist-crowded street, vampire this, blood that, stakes and garlic and other bullshit to dismiss, fire and homeownership to take seriously. 

Boris’ big suggestion for Theo’s cut of the reward money is to invest wisely, “We’ll be around long time, no? Best to stay rolling in it, as they say.” It’s accompanied by a contradictory but nonetheless firm lecture on the importance of liquidity, to be able to cut and run when you need it, tone-deaf by Theo’s hearing in one part because Theo has already once famously cut and run, and in the other part because Theo’s thought of nothing but returning to his old life and the mechanics surrounding that move for the last twelve hours, since Boris told him his painting was safe. 

When Theo tells Boris that’s exactly what he means to do, Boris laughs, crouched over, knee slapping, _that’s a good one_-type chuckling. “I mean it, Potter, now more than before. You should come work for me.”

“No.”

“What are you going to do, go back to shop and hide in the back while sun is out? Very bad for business.”

Theo’s fists clench at his sides. “I have a life in New York. I have people there, I have to - ”

“What?” Boris laughs. “Get back to your doting fiancé?”

If he stopped and thought about it, he’s sure Kitsey probably would have made the list even now. After Hobie, after Mrs. Barbour, hell, even after Platt, she’d have been etched down toward the bottom, if not purely because of responsibility.

“Yes,” Theo says, just to piss him off.

It doesn’t work though. Boris’ lips stay crooked in this knowing half-grin that makes Theo pissed off instead, like Boris thinks he’s going to win out in the end, he’ll keep pressing his luck, if he just keeps playing. Theo knows a little too much about that kind of mentality to think he’ll succeed. 

Boris turns down the next street, and Theo stops in his tracks. The street is crowded, cluttered with racing heartbeats, too many kinds of temptations all at once. The red lights aren’t a metaphor; they light up the street not invitingly, but ominously. 

“Coming, Potter?” Boris calls, who hasn’t stopped walking to let Theo catch up, but has turned around to face him, walking backwards with the confidence of someone who won’t take a misstep. Theo lets himself get pulled forward by the rope Boris has tied firmly around both of their waists.

Boris walks the street like he has a particular place in mind, eyes roaming to enjoy what’s on offer but with no clear intent to buy. Theo keeps in his head down, timing his strides to keep pace with Boris and remain as inconspicuous as he can manage with over six feet of ambling anxiety to draw attention to. 

It’s been odd, Theo has noted several times the past few weeks since Boris crashed back into his life, to see Boris wrapped up in a coat, when all Theo’s ever associated him with is heat. There’s no breath curling out from his mouth like everyone else on the street, he just looks compact and serious, his hands pushed into his coat pockets, his collar turned up to the cold. In the red light, Boris looks like what he is.

There’s no one in the window of the house that Boris stops at and delivers two swift knocks to the door. Theo hovers further back on the stairs leading up, ready to sprint off if he needs to. The door opens to reveal a man older than both of them, soft around his edges, with a shock of red hair long enough to brush at his ears and an easy grin on his face. He’s wearing only a silk robe, the hint of his bare chest underneath, his legs carelessly exposed like he’s immune to the cold. 

“Tijd niet gezien,” he says, eyes only for Boris. 

Theo’s known most everyone he’s come across in Amsterdam to speak English, but they transact only in Dutch, as if to build a wall between themselves and Theo. Boris’ soft touches to the man’s forearm and gentle, flirtatious tone grants them entry into the foyer, where they give their coats over to a large rack in the corner that holds three other coats, the only hint of other _house guests_.

Theo doesn’t know if this man is the waiter or the meal until he leads them into a simple bedroom and closes the door behind them - the meal, then. The man forgoes the bed in favor of the ghastly French provincial sofa situated in front of a burning fireplace. Beware fire, Theo remembers absently from his lessons as he watches Boris join him. 

“This is Sem,” Boris says, but Theo decides it’s worse to know his name.

Sem eyes Theo, then looks back at Boris and asks a question. Boris does the same, eyes sparkling like this is a game, then gives an answer to Sem and his own question that garners a shrug from Sem and what looks like a murmur of assent. There’s clearly an empty spot left for Theo on the sofa, one-third of it free, but he still stands at the doorway, stubborn until the end, or just stubborn until the breaking point.

When Boris kisses Sem, Theo’s mouth drops open with a feeling that touches on too many things to be definable - anger, disgust, betrayal, jealousy. His eyes are glued to every movement, watching Boris undo the double knotted tie of Sem’s robe one handed, with a deftness that says he’s done this far too many times to count, and squeeze at him, his thumb playing at the spot where Sem’s underwear has already gone wet. 

“Do you need some privacy?” Theo asks him blandly.

“He says he doesn’t mind being watched.”

“What the fuck, Boris,” Theo huffs, turning away nonetheless. The feeling becomes definable in that instance - it’s want, and it sits heavy on him again, the flash of a damning thought striking him brief and then gone - he doesn’t know if he wishes he were Boris or Sem. 

There’s the sound of slow but rhythmic movement, one breath panting, but then there’s a bitten off grunt, too close to pained to be pure pleasure, and a sweet, mouthwatering scent that has Theo turning back around again. Boris’ face is buried in Sem’s neck, mouth open wide, the muscles straining as he swallows twice before pulling off. 

“Potter, come over here,” he says into Sem’s chest where his tongue collects up a streak of blood that’s managed to escape. His voice sounds wrecked and his hand still works at Sem’s dick, slow and teasing, like he’s keeping him warmed up for Theo. Boris looks back at Theo finally, an impatient eyebrow crooked. “You’re hungry, yes?”

He is, but he won’t admit it. He doesn’t want it, but he’ll never stop wanting it, and he knows it’s stupid to keep fighting it, like a child stomping their feet on the floor fully knowing that’s not going to get him what he wants. _Just fucking do it_, he tells himself, _you already know you’re going to_. 

Theo kneels onto the sofa, one hand gripping the dark wood of the backrest to steady himself as he looks down at Sem, whose eyes are closed and mouth is puffing desperate little breaths Theo is jealous of. Sem looks so alive, lit up by the attention, heart beating fast and delicious, reminding Theo of the week’s worth of meals he’s lost, of the danger Sem doesn’t even realize he’s in.

“I’ll tell you when to stop,” Boris says, like he can hear the frantic chant of _what if I kill him_ running through Theo’s mind. Theo presses his eyes closed and his lips to Sem’s neck. Boris’ hand moves faster between them, his arm stroking up and down Theo’s chest now that he’s so close, almost in time with the pounding of Sem’s heart. “Don’t bite, just drink.”

At Theo’s first pull, Sem comes between them with a groan, his head rolling back to give Theo even more space and his hips twitching erratically in pleasure. The taste of his blood switches over from good to fucking _great_ on Theo’s second swallow, and it’s like Theo can feel it burn its way through each and every one of his veins. It matches the feeling of exhilaration he’d experienced from seeing his painting again in that briefcase, noting each familiar brushstroke; it mirrors the feeling of relief in finally coming home after a long day, something Theo hasn’t felt since his mom died. He presses his sun-scarred hand to the other side of Sem’s neck just to feel his pulse flutter at Theo’s third mouthful. 

“Okay, okay,” Boris says, his free hand pushing at Theo’s shoulder until he falls away, running his tongue over his teeth and swallowing again and again just to make sure he hasn’t missed a drop. Theo feels as fucked out as Sem looks, boneless and painted in blood and come that Boris cleans up quickly with his mouth, paying special attention to the bite until it seems to stop bleeding on its own. 

Theo stands when Boris does, the transaction done, blood rushing quickly to Theo’s head like it used to at the end of a night when he’s had a few more drinks than he thought. Boris and Sem chat quietly, Boris squeezing at Theo’s shoulder, something like pride in his grin as he pulls out his wallet. Sem waves at him, says _nee, niet_ a few times until Boris puts away his wallet, falsely sheepish perhaps only to Theo’s eyes in a way that clearly says he was never expecting to pay.

Theo’s at the door when Sem speaks again, clearly and in accented English, “Happy Christmas.” It startles Theo too much to answer. 

They collect their coats and are gone from the house without a word. Theo knows the implication of leaving one of these houses, keeps his head down so no one on the street can see how he must look - fuck stupid and satisfied - and rubs at his mouth, pulling his hand away to make sure there’s no blood.

He can feel Boris watching him closely, he knows it’s only a matter of time before Boris can’t help himself, his mouth will have to start running, and he’s proven right as soon as they turn the first corner. 

“What?” Boris asks. “Don’t say _nothing_, you are full of questions, I feel it from over here.”

There’s too many to start with, too many Theo doesn’t want to know the answer to. So he asks, “You get free hookers?”

“Are they hookers, if it is free,” Boris says, but it doesn’t sound like a question, rhetorical or not, just a simple statement that he’s convinced himself is fact. 

“So you always - like.” He makes a broad gesture.

“Yes, I always like, Potter.” He seems like he’s going to leave it there, grinning and willfully misinterpreting what Theo had meant, before he stops in the street. By the sudden, dark look on his face, this will be one of Boris’ more serious lessons.

“The blood is better when the heart is racing, it pumps strong, it means they are alive - this is just science.” He shrugs like it’s a well-known fact, the product of years of objective study, and not something he could have pulled out of his ass because before three weeks ago, vampires were a laughable idea. “Open to interpretation, I say. Most vampires choose to chase, they like the hunt, a fight, it’s only thrill left in the world, maybe. Fear pumps blood through the heart very sweet, it is true. But I prefer this way, more honest transaction, no? Their pleasure is all mine.”

There’s a casual confidence to Boris’ voice that says he speaks very clearly from experience, that he’s tried every meal available on the menu and hand-picked his favorite. Before Amsterdam, he wouldn’t have been able to picture Boris in a chase, pale skin and white teeth gleaming in the moonlight, taking pleasure in capturing and draining his prey. But there’s a lifetime of changes about Boris that Theo doesn’t know about.

“You liked it too, yes?” Boris asks. Theo doesn’t nod, but his non-answer is answer enough. “No shame in it. This is what we are.”

Theo smarts at being coupled with Boris in the worst way yet, the price for their shared immortality the destruction of their own humanity as they transmogrified into the stuff of nightmares. Boris doesn’t seem to bat an eye at it, ever, but why would he. _You do what it takes to survive._

He killed a man today, and drank from another. He’d kept a thumb to Sem’s pulse, maybe to make sure it was still beating, but deeper down he thinks, it may have just been to warn him of when it would stop.

“What,” Boris prompts again, and the truth is too hard to say - that Boris in turn horrifies him and disgusts him, that he’s also horrified and disgusted by himself. Because he liked it, because he wants more, because it’s a decadence that has fortunate, unfortunate abundance, and the more Boris shows him it’s easy to live with, the easier it’s going to be to live with himself. And he hates that. And he hates that Boris knows it without him ever having to admit it, he can hear it like a heartbeat, read his secrets like a book.

Theo stays instead, “You couldn’t have picked a girl?”

Boris laughs, slapping at Theo’s back like this is simple banter. “At least it was red head, no? Your type, I know you.”

That’s exactly the problem, Theo thinks. He knows too much. 

\----


	2. The Architect

_Is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?_

\--

He has to wait until the sun sets to identify Hobie’s body. 

He makes up some excuse - he’s in Montpelier and will need half the day to drive back down to the city. His voice breaks when he asks them to wait for him, forego business hours because to wait for 8 am tomorrow would be cruelty, and it’s not put upon. He would have thought, what with the technical death of his heart and mind and - if it exists - his soul, that he’d have been free of heartbreak, of emotion rending him in two. Nonetheless the pressure builds in his chest in its best attempts to asphyxiate him and his dry tear ducts refuse him his only natural course of catharsis.

He hails a taxi to the morgue, as most methods of public transport have been off limits to him for years on his bad days, and this day is worse than any of the others. He keeps his arms folded tight to his chest and his teeth clenched shut, grateful for the deep sense of intuition New York cabbies have about when to keep their mouths shut.

Parts of him are at war over whether it’s truly Hobie, the camp situated firmly in denial conveniently skirting around the fact that they seemed to call him out of procedure and less out of a true need to solve a mystery where he is the last missing piece. He hasn’t seen Hobie in over a day. He hadn’t asked after him. 

Some of Hobie’s late dinners turn into late nights, which turn into kind offers of spare bedrooms, because who should really be traveling so late,_ especially at my age, _Hobie would say, at which point Theo would dutifully make a noise of protest. In the morning, there had been no telltale sound of buzzing drifting up from the basement, no coffee brewing in the kitchen, which again was not abnormal to his afterlife, considering Hobie would sometimes cover for Theo in the daytime.

Hobie knew something more than he let on, but never asked. The same way that Kitsey did, maybe, but exercised in different ways. Hobie with his calm maneuvering around confronting something head on in favor of keeping his head down - the ultimate form of trust that Theo never deserved, most especially after _The Goldfinch _\- versus Kitsey, who would draw the dark, thick curtains in rooms Theo was in just to watch him jump up and leave quickly. They’d both known he’d changed after Amsterdam, in some unknowable way, another deep trauma to match the set he has already spent his life involuntarily curating, and knew better, in that true New York way, than to ask. 

It’s unsettling that the morgue looks more like an office building than it does something ominous. He swallows down memories of the last time he’d been swept up in death as a business transaction and lets himself into the building. The morgue is on the second floor instead of a basement like Theo expects, though it is largely windowless in a way he could conceivably call home. 

There’s a woman waiting for him beside a reception desk on the other side a set of heavy white doors; she looks young enough to have drawn the short straw to stay behind after him when everyone else has gone home. She’s tired, at the end of what must be a long day in those non-sensible heels she wears, looking every inch an easy target if he worked that way. 

“I’m Theodore Decker,” he says, pausing for some recognition to cross her face. It doesn’t, and the part of him that thinks maybe this can’t be real feels a quick surge of hope. “I’m here for James Hobart.”

“Right,” she answers, dashing that sense of hope in just one word. If Theo’s heart could break, it might have just then. 

The walk isn’t long, another pair of heavy white doors that has to be opened with a key card granting them access to a modern medical tomb that hides bodies in the wall behind titanium doors so as not to threaten the living with their inevitable ends exposed in the open air. Hobie’s in one of these, no longer a person but a body, tagged and filed away. For as abrupt as his parents were taken away from him, it might be a mercy Theo had never had to see them like this, all clinical, sterile.

Guilt sinks into his chest in one of the momentary flashes of the man from Amsterdam he’d killed. Most days, it feels like the memory of it hides around any corner, waiting to jump out and assault Theo at any given moment, that little niggling reminder of the price he paid for his own life, the cost of someone else’s. He’d needed it, but he’d also wanted it, and it’s the wanting that damns him the most.

He could have caused this moment for someone else, some poor weeping mother or girlfriend trying to make sense of a bloated body fished out of the canal, or whatever had actually happened to him, wondering who could have possibly been so cruel.

“Mr. Decker,” she says, like it’s not the first time she’s done so, and he looks up at her finally.

She has him join her next to a drawer on the far side of the room. In the midst of all this death, of the rotting blood growing colder in each body that Theo can scent without trying, she lets off an enticing heat. His gums throb and he turns away slightly, as though the experience were too much, to work his jaws over nothing until he can calm himself.

She’s chewing mint gum. Theo doesn’t quite understand how she can manage to, what with scent and taste tied so inextricably he imagines it can’t taste of anything other than formaldehyde. He remembers being told in biology that the mint could help mitigate the smell, but it wasn’t ever the smell that bothered Theo most, only the proximity and the study. They’d sliced open frogs and pigs, cataloged and categorized every part of them that had once made them living beings until they were nothing more than hyper realistic diagrams with no trace of what could have been a soul. There was no circumstance in which Theo could say, _I don’t want this_, so he did it anyway.

There’s no circumstance now in which Theo can tell her he doesn’t want this, so he lets her pull open the drawer and gently peel back the sheet covering Hobie’s body until his face appears, pallid and neutral to anyone else’s eyes but Theo’s, who only see disappointment. “What happened to him?”

“I couldn’t speculate prior to beginning the autopsy,” she says, marking things off on her clipboard. Theo just looks at her until she looks up and gives in. “Stabbed, probably, looks like he bled out, maybe somewhere other than he was found. They said there wasn’t anything at the scene. Maybe mugged, he didn’t have a phone or wallet on him.”

The second bit of hope dies within Theo, the thought that it might have just been a heart attack in Central Park, anything natural, as close to peaceful as can be managed. She moves away, maybe to give him a moment, maybe to check on anything else, it doesn’t really matter to Theo because he’s glad for it, he just needs confirmation. 

Theo gently pulls at the sheet, just a few inches further down to expose what he knows will be waiting at the juncture of Hobie’s neck and shoulder - skin rent apart by teeth, not the perfect half-moon Theo specializes in, but something jagged and animalistic and violent. He remembers Boris’ face twisted up in disgust or impatience over Theo’s first attempts. _So sloppy, Potter, impossible to clean, always leaves a trace. We have good manners, they have good time, no fuss._

He hasn’t - hadn’t - seen Hobie in over a day. He should have asked after him.

She has him sign a series of forms he doesn’t read, then clearly expects him to leave, but he can’t - there’s a mental block about leaving Hobie behind here in this place he doesn’t belong, not that there’s any place else Theo can take him. When he finally exits the building, he’s shaking. He’d never asked how many vampires existed, if anyone knew, but it feels too pointed to be a coincidence. Somebody has killed Hobie, maybe to send a message, maybe just to be cruel, and that knowledge is slowly working at the lock to the cage that Theo has kept the monster within him trapped in for six years now. He doubts he’s going to stop it.

It’s dangerous to feed tonight, but he’s kept himself too locked up over the last few days to risk going for much longer. He’s going to shake clear out of his skin if he doesn’t get something in him soon to go to war against the nasty snarl of grief that’s made its home in his hollow chest. He walks the four blocks over into the park, eyes sharp on the hunt for the perfect prey, skipping over tourists and cozy couples lamplit in the darkness. 

He’s almost mindless with it, wandering nose first tracing for blood with a hint of something extra, that he doesn’t even track where he’s going until it’s nearly too late. He comes to a dead stop. The Met is obscured in the distance, the hint of its broad stone facade peeking through trees. No hallowed ground has ever hurt Theo, but this one stands like a warning, a fortress in the dark. It’s the only thing that puts fear in his heart anymore, a twenty-year-old war wound flaring up just at the sight, and he makes a hard retreat the fuck out of Central Park. 

He catches a taxi down to Alphabet City instead, moving on autopilot to the club in his rotation, far enough out from his last visit that there’s likely no one else who’ll remember he’s ever been there. He’s got the face of a first timer, and he always plays it to his advantage. He settles himself on a seat at the bar, on the far end away from the mad crowd jockeying for position with the bartender, because he knows he won’t need her attention. 

The club is as thick with people as a subway car would be, but it’s easier for Theo when he can see the exits and take them, when he doesn’t feel like a cornered animal. It’s so alive in here, the sheer number of heartbeats and the amount of heat they all radiate nearly permeating the dark atmosphere with red light. There’s life lining the walls, not death.

It’s an hour of strikeouts, of Theo inching closer to the bar to shout, “Hi,” near some girl’s ear. “Hey,” they all seem to answer with polite nods or quick tosses of their hair before collecting their drinks from the bartender and walking off. His fingers press deep into the bar top as his jaw works over nothing, frustrated by his dedication to his rules, but tonight more than ever he needs them, as much as a livewire as he’s feeling.

Someone sits two seats away from Theo, grabbing his attention in his peripheral. His pupils are dilated and he’s grinning - maybe at Theo, maybe at someone behind Theo - but it’s not a lost cause. It’s one of the few instances in which the long, unbroken stare Theo uses to hunt is mistaken for flirtation, and he’s rewarded for it. He’s long since left behind any hesitation about men - though he knows what his real preferences are, he’s an opportunist now, takes what he can get. 

Theo moves the two seats over and asks him, “How’re you doing tonight?” 

“Mmm,” he hums as he takes a sip of his drink through a long black straw. Subtle. “Peachy keen. Yourself?”

“Well, thank you,” Theo lies, but it doesn’t seem to matter if it’s convincing. 

“You’re very polite,” he says, pleased. He runs a hand through his hair, dark and thick and curly, which is fine honestly, and grins with his thankfully crooked teeth. It doesn’t matter if he’s handsome when he’s just meant to be dinner. “What’s your name?”

“Harry.”

“Like Potter,” he says, tapping at the stem of Theo’s glasses. Theo startles at first, having forgotten to take his glasses off as he normally does, disguising himself with a clean face like an opposite Clark Kent. Then he gets it together, and chuckles good-naturedly, like he’s supposed to. “I’m sure you get that a lot.”

Theo shrugs good-naturedly, like he’s supposed to.

“Can I buy you a drink?”

Theo shakes his head. “I didn’t come here for a drink.”

He leans in closer to Theo, as unbothered by the rejection as Theo planned. “Do you want to dance?”

“I didn’t come to dance.”

He appraises Theo smartly, taking in each of his nicks and dings, uneven wear and tear, and decides to buy anyway. “All right then.”

They don’t lock the bathroom door behind them, but crowd into a stall instead, Theo pressing him up against the door as soon as he flips the lock. He pushes his nose to the man’s pulse point, soaking up the heat there as hands find their way to clutch at Theo’s waist.

“I’m Mateo, by the way.”

“Cool,” Theo says and kisses him on his mouth, on his neck, behind his ear, down his chest, over his dick trapped under his jeans. Theo’s knees hit the floor as he undoes Mateo’s flies, pulling a startled laugh and an, “Oh, okay,” from him as though this could have possibly gone in any other direction. He sucks a bruise on Mateo’s thigh like a marker because he likes the look of blood rushing to the surface, then sucks him down quickly. 

It’s always perfunctory for Theo, whose pleasure lies in what comes after, and he does his best work on his knees because it’s easier to disguise and there’s not a lot a girl or guy won’t let you do when you’ve got your mouth on them and two fingers in them. He keeps a hand wrapped around Mateo’s thigh, pressed in tight to feel his pulse through his femoral artery grow faster and faster until he’s coming. Theo swallows because it’s easier that way, pulls himself off Mateo, and digs his teeth straight into his thigh where his blood pumps fast and warm through the aftershocks. 

He can’t identify what exactly is running through Mateo’s blood along with the vodka he’d knocked back, but it knocks Theo for a fucking loop, spinning him around so much he can’t remember if he’s on three or four or if he should maybe start counting over again. Six, he decides when Mateo’s fingers tighten in Theo’s hair, and he pulls his teeth gently out of Mateo’s thigh to lap at the bite.

“You are fucking _unhinged_,” Mateo says, but he doesn’t sound mad about it. His fingers keep pulling at Theo’s roots in pulses like heartbeats until Theo rocks out of his reach when he’s finished cleaning him up. He doesn’t feel numb, like he’d hoped he would, but rather claustrophobic, like the world is closing in on him from all sides, stuffing him into a drawer he can’t escape from. His tinnitus rears its ugly head, buzzing louder than the muffled music outside the door and Mateo’s slowing pants. He presses both of his hands to his face, to cover the ring of blood on his lips and the way his face twists up in shame, and he knows he’s in for a bad fucking trip. 

“Do you want - ”

“You should go,” Theo interrupts him. He wants to be left the fuck alone very suddenly, no thought for aftercare, no need for tenderness, and he can’t pretend like he’s supposed to. He sits there buzzing, but perfectly still, feigning rigor mortis until Mateo gives up. 

“Okay.” Mateo sounds disappointed in him. But he does carefully step around Theo and pull the stall door open carefully, sliding through just enough space that he fits in, never risking Theo’s safety. 

Theo’s head thunks back against the wall and heaves a painful sob, his eyes dry as a desert.

\--

The police come by in the afternoon, to talk to Theo in the basement where he’s surrounded by his changelings, where he feels safe, having become one of them. He doesn’t appear to be a suspect, and he doesn’t appear to be of any use to them, wrung out as he feels from spending the better part of the night and morning screaming and tearing his room apart. 

They ask after Hobie’s calendar which Theo knows is empty or security footage which he knows won’t show Hobie’s killer because death moves unseen everywhere. There’s the promise of a crime scene unit, just like off television, to scan the workshop for blood, though there are no signs of forced entry. There wouldn’t be, or couldn’t be - if Hobie died in the basement, it was because he invited his killer in, too kind to be concerned. Besides, there’s no blood in here, Theo would smell it, but he nods anyway, trying to convince himself that the pure business of it all is worth it just to convince himself something might be done about this. They leave him with a business card and the lingering sense of mutual frustration, and it’s a long few hours before he’ll risk the sun going back upstairs. 

The basement is a work in progress, a life in progress, everything left out and open like it’s to be completed still. On his desk, Hobie left two pieces of wood side by side, testing out potential stains for his latest work, an empty mug with a soggy, used teabag in it, his glasses folded up next to a book of matches that gives Theo pause.

Hobie doesn’t smoke, wouldn’t light a candle down here in the single most flammable room on this city block to save his own life. The police must have overlooked it, simple as it is, but Theo knows better. He thumbs at the red matchbook, a name printed boldly in Cyrillic on the back joined by an address in English to a part of town Theo hasn’t been to in six years. When he flips the matchbook open, only one match is missing. 

He’s been warned to stay away from fire - the matches feel like a joke, or a threat, a vampire leaving behind not Hobie’s murder weapon but one that could become his own. Theo sits down at Hobie’s desk chair, fingers still touching the top of the book like he’s weighing it down to stop its escape, and he waits.

He’d tried once to explain to Kitsey what it felt like to be locked inside his head with fifteen years of trauma to keep him company. He’d said, it’s like the way a doctor treats a gunshot wound but not the fact that you’ve been shot, because the wound is sewn up, heals over, maybe a scar to mark its presence, its history, but it’s not the surface wound that lingers, nor the path the bullet burned into your body as it passed through. It’s the way the trauma can’t be surgically removed. It’s the way you cross the line to identify yourself permanently and you can’t go back. 

“This is what I am,” he’d said, an orphan, an addict, a fucking _vampire_, and he can’t erase any of those monikers from the fundamental truth of who he is. He’s been playing at being human for years, stuck in an uncomfortable costume that doesn’t fit him anymore, spouting old familiar catchphrases, and it’s exhausting, but it’s all he has. The one time Pippa gently suggested he go to therapy, he hadn’t thought there was much purpose to it - _this is what I am_ \- because there’s no going back.

The sun dims enough that Theo can escape with a hood up over his head and his hands in his pockets, and walks east with purpose, with an unchangeable decision burning deep in his chest. He’ll kill if he must, to settle the rage in his chest - that’s what he is now.

The green and white awning looks familiar because there are six more on the street just like it, for no other reason than that. Theo slides into the bar, empty but for a table of thick men in the back all crowded around a single table in the back, each burdened with a pint but none of the levity that says they’re there to have a good time.

The bartender is slicing lemons by herself, with the speed of someone who’s hoping to kill a lot of time in just the one task. She doesn’t look up when Theo enters, only when he stands directly in front of her. She pauses first, barely noticeable, a breath’s amount of time, the briefest flicker of uncertainty behind her eyes, but Theo sees it nonetheless. She can’t hide anything from him, not even the small quiver in her voice when she says, “What can I get you?”

He sets the book of matches down on the bar, and the way her face drops says more than she needs to aloud. “You know who I am?” he guesses. She nods. He steps in closer to the bar, leans forward onto his elbows, and lowers his voice. “You know what I am?” She nods again, trying her best to look calm but Theo can smell the terror rolling off her. “I don’t want this to be difficult.” 

She lets out a soft gasp, eyes flicking over to the table of men, then back at Theo. “Please,” she speaks in a whisper of fear, though it’s not clear to Theo which of them she fears more. She could be innocent, Theo imagines, maybe just the wrong place, wrong time, wrong people, and there’s no reason she should be afraid of him, if not for the guilt she shows, the guilt of someone who knows something they shouldn’t or don’t want to. 

It had been a message, then, the matchbook, the attack, someone here knows Theo, knows what he is and what he can do if pushed to the edge, and sent someone who could match him. He’s never been pushed to the edge, having clung so desperately to safe, endless stretches of land, fenced in by his rules and the firm belief that he’s not a monster, that he can’t strike any more fear into someone’s heart now as he could have done before Amsterdam, that if he just kept away from the edge, no one could come for him. Now that he’s been marched right up to the edge, without his feet digging in resistance the whole way, he doesn’t know how far he’ll go, if he’ll run clear over.

“Nobody will know who said what. I promise.”

She looks off to the right, not toward the other table, but just at the wall, and says, “I can’t help you,” but she’s tapping four fingers on her right hand against the bar in a way that feels significant. If it isn’t, Theo will just come back, he’ll take his chances with whoever he has to, he’ll go down fighting.

“Okay.” When he takes a step back and looks up at her, her eyes are watering, one swift blink away from spilling over. He leaves before any tears fall.

He takes a right out of the bar, stops at the next door squeezed in between the bar and the bodega on the other side, eight buzzers lining a panel. The fourth one says _O. Van Maercke,_ and Theo presses at it no less than nine times before he tries every other buzzer and someone takes pity on him. Getting into the building isn’t a problem, the rules don’t work so granular he’s learned, thank god, and he’s headed for a dead man’s apartment, so he can enter it without issue. 

No answer at apartment four, but the door is unlocked, like Van Maercke fears nothing or has nothing. It can’t be this easy, really, unless he was supposed to have been set up for a trap - one he’s stepped into easily only whoever’s laid it doesn’t even have the decency to show up. In his previous life, he’d be too overcome by nonstop paranoia to do anything, certainly to have ever come this far. He’d have spent the night holed up in his room, phone in one hand, matchbook in the other, debating whether to call the police back, to try to save his own life. He’s identified the key difference now - he has nothing left to lose if this whole thing goes to hell.

He inches the door open, listening intently for any sounds of activity on the other side, but it’s quiet aside from the standard humming and groaning every New York apartment suffers from. Theo lets himself into the apartment, finding a sparsely furnished one bedroom, a ripped sofa, an ancient box-shaped television, a single chair at the folding table near the kitchen, no dishes at the sink, a suspicious stain on the carpet at the window that looks new and still stinks with a burning scent that’s familiar to Theo but unplaceable. 

There’s a burner phone on the table, next to Hobie’s phone and wallet, next to a book of matches matching the one in Theo’s pocket. He somehow feels numb to the confirmation. The phone has with six missed calls, all from the same number, so Theo calls it, why the fuck not. The line rings for longer than a cell phone would, but eventually it catches, swapping ringing for a tense silence, not even the sound of someone breathing down the line.

Eventually someone answers in gruff Russian, simple enough that Theo still remembers the translation - _who is this_?

“Fuck,” Theo whispers.

At which point Boris says tentatively, “Potter?”

Theo snaps the phone shut and throws it against the wall, watching without satisfaction as it breaks into six pieces. Despite the shock, it feels inevitable, all roads leading to Rome, just what Theo deserves.

\--

Theo will have to do the math someday, to find out how many of his own personal tragedies is Boris the architect of. They compound, each one worse than the last, and they’re too meticulously crafted to hurt Theo to be anything other than a mistake. Because Boris never does anything where he doesn’t win. Sometimes Theo has to lose for Boris to win.

If Boris hadn’t ever lost Theo’s painting, Theo wonders when he would have known, if he’d ever have been told, if Boris would have ever made it right. It wouldn’t have lost its value, traded indefinitely, Boris’ perennial ace in the hole. He’d have lived off Theo’s loss for decades, centuries maybe, long after Theo had died, his fidelity only conditional on his own personal fuck ups. Theo wonders how long it would have taken this one to get back to him, if it ever would have, because this one feels personal, targeted, not something Theo could ever excuse, taking out a fucking contract to kill the only person in Theo’s life that matters anymore, to give Hobie the death Theo had feared he’d give himself if he slipped up even once. 

This wasn’t supposed to happen. He was never supposed to see Boris again. These carefully segmented parts of his life were never supposed to bleed into each other. He’d made that promise to himself in Antwerp, when Boris had left him in his flat on New Year’s Day, promising he only had a few hours of business to attend to before he’d be back, pressing a quick kiss to the side of Theo’s mouth before he’d gone like Theo was going to be some kind of housewife desperately awaiting his return. Theo had packed up what few things he had brought with him and went to the airport, carefully building up the walls inside him that he’d needed to live in reality and not the alternate universe he’d found himself in.

He wasn’t supposed to track Boris down in a fucking office in the Lower East Side, sat behind a desk as if his business - _bit of this, bit of that_ \- wasn’t steeped in stealing money and lives. Theo sees him painted red, his pale face and dark hair coloring over with the anger that pounds at his chest so hard it might restart his heart. Six years have done nothing to Boris’ face - Theo’s neither, he assumes, confirmed only by older ladies who hold his hand and wish for his seemingly eternal youth as they buy another Queen Anne they think they’ll live long enough to justify the cost for. Six years and it’s likely Boris hasn’t changed a bit.

“You came,” Boris announces, and he has the gall to sound fucking surprised by it. “You know, is fate again, maybe, I was just thinking of calling you yesterday - ”

“Get up,” Theo cuts him off. His fists curl at his sides, another echo of the past where he tried to square up to Tom Cable at school, only this time Theo knows his teeth are better weapons, and this time he suspects he may get to draw blood.

“Potter.” He sounds bemused, not worried, not afraid. Theo wants him afraid.

“Get the fuck up.”

With reluctance, Boris rises to his feet. “Look, I’m so sorry, really - ”

Theo charges him, catching Boris off guard enough that he’s able to get a grip on his throat and slam him against the wall behind his desk. He keeps Boris pinned with an arm pressed against his neck, knowing he won’t choke him in anyway, but the instinct to hit him where a human is vulnerable is all Theo knows. Boris’ face twists in discomfort as his head knocks against the wall, his mouth already opening so he can get the first words out.

“Kill whoever you want in my life,” Theo says first. “I’m never going to be yours.”

“I,” Boris starts, but Theo isn’t interested in that answer either, shoving a hand over his mouth. It’s the only thing he could possibly think of, beyond Boris descending deep past cruelty and straight into villainy - that even after all this time, the only way to get Theo back would be to strip off everything worth living for, to leave him with nothing, just the same as he’d been in Vegas.

Boris pushes him back so his hands dislodge, but he recovers quickly, his fist connecting with Boris’ chin with a sickening snap. Boris stumbles to the side, a hand pressed to his jaw, as he snaps, “The _fuck_,” and Theo feels every inch his father’s son.

Theo gets him laid out on the floor in a tackle, his body braced over Boris’, delivering other blows that Boris tries to dodge or block, but he can’t avoid them all. Maybe he’s strong enough to do this, or maybe Boris is just letting him. His teeth flash and clamp around Boris’ neck, ready to sink in fully, ready to _rip_ when Boris’ hips snap up and over. He switches them, Theo’s back hitting the carpet hard and his arms quickly pinned above his head. Boris keeps them both perfectly still, no winded breathing from the effort, just calm, unmoving strength that Theo can’t match. 

“Are you finished now? Out of your system?” Boris watches him closely, on the defensive still. When Theo says no, Boris lifts his chin defiantly, and Theo can see where his teeth have dug small punctures into Boris’ skin, betraying a hint of the thick decayed blood under his skin. “You will listen to me.”

“_Fuck you_, Boris.”

“I didn’t kill Hobie. I didn’t - _listen to me_,” he growls, smacking Theo clean across the face, the shock of it throwing Theo for a loop more than the pain. The fight used to drain out of him in the past, but not today. Boris catches Theo’s hands again and presses down on his wrists harder when Theo struggles fruitlessly for release. “I know who did. I know you do too, if you came to find me. He was mine, but I never ordered that. I wouldn’t. You look at me now and know that I do not lie to you. When I found out what he did, I killed him. I killed him myself for what he did to you.”

Theo hesitates because it sounds like the truth, not the performative swagger of Boris’ youth, but something very like the same anger that radiates from Theo’s body, contagious. It’s the truth, but Theo doesn’t know if he wants it to be. “You didn’t.”

“I did. Otto Van Maercke. I slit his throat in his apartment, set his body on fire by the Hudson, I swear to you, I fucking did.” Boris’ hands slide from Theo’s wrists to his chest, not pinning him, but pressing sincerity through his hands. Theo doesn’t want Boris to be delicate with him, doesn’t want his pity or remorse; he doesn’t want anything to do with him at all. 

“Get the fuck off me,” Theo demands, and Boris does, slowly, his hands poised in front of him, maybe in defense, maybe pacifying. Theo rolls to his feet, dusting off his pants as a means of busying himself so he doesn’t look at Boris, so he doesn’t fall apart where he stands. Boris took from Theo his revenge as well. “You shouldn’t have taken that from me, you shouldn’t have done that.”

“Can’t have a vampire running around, killing my acquaintances. Bad for business, what does that say about my authority?”

Theo bites down several arguments at once - _Hobie wasn’t yours either, who the fuck cares about your authority, this is about more than just damage control_. “I would have taken care of it.”

“You wouldn’t have, I know you.”

“I went to his apartment. I came here, didn’t I.”

“You did,” Boris says, like he’s discovering something. “You would have killed him yourself?”

Theo thinks of the gun shaking in his hand, his finger curled around the trigger, the moment’s hesitation that lead to his death. He thinks of draining the life of the first person he’d drank from and how he’d tried to unsuccessfully convince himself he’d have stopped if he knew how to. That was then, this is now. 

“Yes.”

\--

Lying side by side in Boris’ bed while the snow fell all day on New Year’s Eve in Antwerp, Boris had ever asked him if he’d return to Vegas, and Theo already thought of the answer. It would be when he’s done with all this. He’ll release himself to vast nothingness twice over - the sundrenched desert and whatever awaits him after. He’ll be gone suddenly, nothing to clean or fix or mourn. 

Boris had nodded, uncharacteristically solemn, and said, “You tell me when, Potter. We’ll go together.” Theo had known, even in that moment, he would never make the call.

A touch dramatic, his chosen backdrop, sure, but it’ll be neater that way - kinder, even, to anyone he may leave behind. He’d rather be there one moment, then he’s gone - like magic, like his dad. So nobody would have to deal with this - a wake, an urn, forty-six pairs of red, wet eyes, and the inability to start screaming at the top of his lungs because social protocol says he can’t. 

Pippa stands sandwiched between Theo and Everett, bearing the full weight of the evening on her delicate shoulders like a battle-hardened soldier who understands what she has to do, even if she doesn’t want to do it. Theo can’t imagine she’d have been at Welty’s funeral, laid up as she was at the time, but now she stands like the shrine everyone pays an offering to, clasping hands and giving hugs and sharing tears because Theo can’t do any of that. 

He’d told Pippa, anyone who would listen, it was a heart attack that took him, sparing them all from the violence of it, trying to fashion dignity out of it even if he knows it’s impossible. He can’t admit that he wishes it was him instead, that he wouldn’t even have put up a fight if he knew it would mean saving Hobie’s life. Instead they’re still left with tragedy, but the ordinary kind, the kind that has old women clucking _poor dear, poor soul_, _gone too soon, but he lived a good life_. 

He did live a good life, at least that much is true, because he was good, kind, generous, and it’s a harsh truth of life that only death brings this much love to one place in your honor, that celebration is only this fierce when you can’t see it. Theo will have to hope Hobie knew that whatever goodness lived in Theo, however small, was bloomed through Hobie’s careful tending. Though now that the gardener is gone, he fears it will wither and die.

Someone asks him what he’ll do with the Hobart & Blackwell, its namesakes both gone, like Hobie’s urn hadn’t just been delivered this morning. The all too soon of it turns Theo’s stomach. He can’t answer _wither and die_ or ask to follow Pippa to London or book a one-way ticket to Las Vegas, so he shuts down, shaking and silent until Pippa takes pity on him and leads him gently out of the crowd and into the hallway.

“How are you?” she asks stupidly, but what else do you say.

“Hollow,” Theo answers. The grief is the only useful thing that lives inside him, the rest of his body stitched together from dead parts, joined by the bullet that killed him. Before living with Hobie, grief was the closest thing Theo ever had to a home, familiar, unchanging, lying in wait for him to return to it. Grief doesn’t give him anything, it doesn’t do anything for him, but for a moment there, it had spurred him to action, had taken him to Otto and to Boris. 

She takes his hand, but she wouldn’t if she knew. He knows people are defined by the secrets they keep, some, like Theo, more literally than others. He doesn’t have fangs or red eyes or anything of the sort because in reality, monsters just look like people. He wants to tell her everything, that grief would have driven him to kill if he’d had the chance, because this is the only time his grief could have coupled easily with vengeance and action, that kneejerk _you take something from me, I take something from you_ reaction. But she’d hate to know it.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

“I wouldn’t have wanted that for you,” she says, silently tacking on _again_ to the end of the sentence with the soft brush of her thumb against the back of his. It’s right that she doesn’t tell him he couldn’t have done anything, because he could have, because he’s dangerous. But he doesn’t know, and will never know, which will sit on his conscience harder - being there or not. Being there for Welty scarred him for years, his body growing around the scar and in spite of the scar for years, but he can’t say with certainty that his life would have been better if he hadn’t been at Welty’s side as he died.

“I didn’t cry for Welty,” she says, though tears are spilling over her cheeks now. “I don’t think I understood much of what was going on, and by the time I had, it felt like too much time had passed. The moment was gone. So it sat inside me, not growing, just there, this Welty-sized part of me that’s gone rotten. I loved him like he was still alive and it felt rotten.” Theo pulls her into a hug, and thinks as much as he doesn’t want her to know, she would still somehow find a way to understand. “I can’t believe they’re both gone.”

He presses a brief kiss to the top of her head, which is all he knows how to do in this moment. He’s known for years Pippa can’t tend to the garden of good inside him, she told him as much then and it’s still true now, though it’s possible they’ve morphed into different people over time. Theo is an ex-husband and Pippa is a wife. Theo is hollow in death and Pippa is full with life.

Everett finds them embracing, unbothered by it because he knows how fully Theo isn’t a threat. He has a hand each to gently touch their backs in sympathy as they pull apart, and tells Theo someone is looking for him. There’s no one Theo wants to see that isn’t with him already, but he moves along anyway, leaving Pippa to better care with Everett. It won’t be Mrs. Barbour, who passed along her condolences with the large floral arrangements that formed the focus point around which the wake has been designed, but it could be Platt, come to liberate him for drinks he hasn’t caught on do nothing for Theo, or, god forbid, Kitsey come to mourn performatively like she’s making a point.

It’s neither, of course, it’s only Boris at the edge of the party, tracking Theo with sharp eyes from the moment they see each other across the room until Theo comes to stand in front of him. 

“It’s good to see you. Even under such circumstances.”

“Fuck you, Boris,” he says quietly, a quick flash of venom. He can’t ever take a fucking hint, like nearly getting his throat ripped out last week isn’t enough to know that Theo can’t stand the sight of his face. “You’re not invited in this home.”

“It does not work that way anymore.” Somehow he sounds sorry about it. It doesn’t work, never has for Theo, because Theo doesn’t have a home he can control, and it doesn’t work for Hobie because Hobie’s fucking dead. 

“Get out.”

Boris shakes his head. “I have to tell you something.”

That’s never a good fucking sign, he’d just as soon never be told anything from Boris ever again, it’s mostly led to Theo’s extreme suffering, the end rarely justifying the means, the rest of it not yet balancing out the sheer joy that came from the liberation of_ The Goldfinch_. “What.”

Boris hesitates, his lips pressing together as his eyes cut to the side quickly. “Maybe you should join me in the kitchen.”

“Just say it.”

“I don’t think I should.”

“I’m not playing these games with you anymore, just fucking say it.”

“I know who hired Otto to kill Hobie.”

“Jesus _christ_,” Theo hisses, tugging at Boris’ arm to drag him into the kitchen, sneaking furtive looks around to make sure no one’s heard. 

Boris looks unimpressed. “What did I tell you. I said go to kitchen, and you ignored me.”

“Just shut up. Just - ” Theo holds a hand up to him and steps away, his mind racing faster than his heart can catch up. 

He’d let the idea of revenge slip through his hands, collected by Boris and therefore unable to keep. He hadn’t thought of continuing to pull the thread, until the whole thing unraveled. That’s what he needs Boris for.

“We should go now, we can take care of it now,” Boris says.

Across the way, Theo can see Pippa eyeing him and Boris from where she’s tucked into Everett’s side, his eyebrows drawn and tense likely with the memory of the last time she’d seen Boris, when Theo has stolen away in the night and left her vulnerable to a roomful of people she didn’t know, to a predator of another kind. She needs him now, or maybe just he needs her. Theo can’t disappear again, he can’t do that anymore. He has to be human right now.

“No.”

Boris doesn’t move, just watches him from where he stands confident on the other side of the room, and reveals the ace up his sleeve. “It’s Lucius Reeve.”

Then all of sneaking, nagging suspicions Theo’s had since that day are true. It wasn’t a coincidence. It was Theo’s fault. He’s stuck on a train that only ever moves in a closed circle, destined to loop back on the past a hundred times over until they finally let him off. His mistakes, the badness that combats the goodness in his heart - he will never be rid of them, never finish atoning for him. 

“This is Hobie’s funeral. This is -” Theo cuts off. Different than last time, something that matters, whatever else that ends that sentence will still fall on deaf ears, he thinks. 

But they don’t.

“Come with me,” Boris says, hastily adding when Theo scowls down at him, “when you can. My number hasn’t changed.”

When Boris says come, Theo’s always gone running, but the only time Theo’s ever asked him, Boris couldn’t do the same._ It’s not fair,_ Theo wants to shout at his retreating back, but fair has never meant anything to fate or to Theo or to anyone else who knows better. 

Revenge starts to take seed again within the grief, the unsubtle chant of _do something do something do something _within him watering it. He looks at Pippa, sunlight pushing through the darkness, and thinks he can give her this, since neither of them had received reparations for the Met. Nobody should be able to battle death and win, with Theo’s rare exception, but he can introduce someone else into the fight, and he can fix it so they lose.

\--

Theo likes grey, sunless days because they feel distinctly New York, they feel safe even if they might not be - Theo’s never tried his luck to find out for sure. He’s gotten comfortable with grey out of necessity. Theo lives his life not in darkness but a grey area, same as Boris, who paints everything grey like he knows no other color. He doesn’t honestly know if he believes good can come from bad or bad can come from good, as Boris insists. It doesn’t feel good setting Reeve up, but it does feel right.

Boris can pick a lock, because of course he can, deftly opening both locks to Reeve’s apartment door - or wherever they are - and swinging the door open, the hooked chain clattering as it goes like an announcement that nobody’s home. Theo hasn’t asked after the plan, because in the end it hadn’t mattered anyway last time, Boris had just done whatever and Theo was along for the ride, just as anxious knowing everything as he was knowing nothing.

The door swings shut with a nudge from Boris and he does up the two locks behind him. There’s no gun on him, not that Theo can tell, not even tucked into his absurd heeled boots, and he can tell Boris is restless without something to fidget with ritually. They leave the lights switched off and wait, minutes ticking by like hours, making Boris’ intel that he’d be here tonight sound like bullshit.

“You’re sure it’s him?” Theo asks.

“Yes. Forty thousand sitting in Otto’s accounts like I wouldn’t check. Tsk.”

“How do you know?”

“I have my ways,” Boris says vaguely. Theo passes him an unimpressed look. “You want me to have him admit?” He takes Theo’s silence for confirmation. “Easy. Wait in the hallway.”

Theo had to have himself take a step back this morning at the convenience of the culprit earlier today, the one person to make him break all the rules resurfacing out of nowhere, after all this time. Boris knows too much, always has, Theo spilling secrets and truths out of his mouth like they were only ever meant to belong to Boris, so of course he knows about Reeve. And of course Theo went running with him, two decades of blind trust still too hard to shake.

The door unlocks after eight. “Go,” Boris whispers at him, settling himself down in an armchair, one leg crossed over the other, so Theo waits in the hallway as instructed, only just able to see Boris from where he’s peeking through the shadow.

“You - you can’t be here,” Reeve says, his heartbeat ratcheting up just on the sight of Boris, a sensation Theo used to be all too familiar with.

Boris shrugs pleasantly, like semantics is his favorite linguistic quirk. “This is nobody’s home.”

Reeve steps further in, closing the door behind him, and Theo melts further back into the hallway, closing his eyes and listening.

“Have you thought anymore about my offer?” Boris keeps his voice just as pleasant, more pleasant than he’s ever been with Theo, too close to innocent not to be laying a trap. 

“Cut the bullshit, Pavlikovsky - yes, I know who you are. I know you had me followed.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, I caught your guy three weeks ago.”

Theo frowns. He was talking to Reeve three weeks ago? For what fucking reason, he couldn’t have known what was to come. Unless, Theo thinks with a jolt, unless he’d been stirring shit up like always, their paths had not crossed as criminals by happenstance, but rather by Boris’ own design.

“Well, subtlety was never Otto’s strong suit,” Boris mourns before his voice hardens, slips into a tone Theo only associates with Boris’ business, the tone that must have made him as successful as he is. He speaks not wild with passion, not with his hands flying, not in the classic Boris way, but rather low, careful, dangerous. “Very bad business with James Hobart.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” From the sound of it, Reeve knows exactly what Boris means. Confirmation after all. 

“I understand bad blood, I have tasted plenty myself. But you shouldn’t have killed him. This was mistake.”

Reeve’s voice grows thin as his heart rate continues to climb. He’s not pleading, not quite there yet, but on his way. “It wasn’t supposed to be him. It wasn’t supposed to be any of that - ”

“No? You hire vampire, you know what vampires do.”

“He was just supposed to rough him up.”

“Who?” Boris asks, just to gather up that last piece of hard evidence Theo doesn’t need anyway. It still feels like a shock to his system to hear Reeve say his name aloud after all this time. 

“I thought - it wasn’t hard to connect the dots between you two once I suspected. The painting. New York, Amsterdam, Miami. Vegas.” 

“Impressive.”

“I thought he’d get you to call it off. That’s all, I swear.”

“Sounds like you thought wrong.”

There’s a sound of movement that’s too charged for Theo not to lean back up and inch toward the cut of wall that separates him and the others, and finds Boris casually blocking the door by leaning on it, arms crossed, and Reeve standing tense, just out of arm’s distance.

“Leave now,” Reeve says, pulling something out of his pocket that shines silver in the lamplight where it dangles from his hand. A cross. 

Boris’ lips quirk, one side tilting up in amusement. “Otto tell you that kind of thing works?” The way Reeve’s face falls is answer enough. Boris pulls himself off the door and takes a step toward Reeve, catching the necklace in his hand and admiring it. “Beautiful.” He yanks it out of Reeve’s hand without much force needed and tosses it to the ground. 

Reeve gets one warning, Boris saying, “If you know me, then you know what happens when someone comes for my people,” before Boris’ hand grips his throat and swings him around to hit the wall, strong and fast enough that Reeve looks like a ragdoll in the jaws of a lion.

He’s gasping, trying to say something, but Boris just squeezes harder, hissing through his teeth until Reeve falls silent. “Come here, Theo,” Boris says, and that’s when Reeve seems to realize it’s over for him. 

Theo’s not quick about it - it’s a lazy hunt when the prey is already caught - because he wants Reeve to see him. Guilt eats away at Reeve’s features now that he thinks he’s going to die, over getting caught, over doing the wrong thing, the why doesn’t bother Theo so much as long as he feels it.

Boris looks satisfied, righteous in their task, tipping Reeve’s head to the side to expose his neck, an invitation Theo wants, Reeve deserves. Reeve trembles against Theo’s lips, his heart pounding underneath the quaking, more alive and terrified than anyone Theo’s fed from, and the sick twist in his heart that’s meant to keep him human rages against the furious hunger in his stomach and loses. 

Theo doesn’t allow him any last words, doesn’t have any of his own to grant because he isn’t worth the effort. His teeth speak for him, sinking deep, unforgiving into the thin, vulnerable skin, and he drinks deep. Reeve screams, bloodcurdling, until Boris slaps a hand over his mouth to silence him. 

His blood tastes better than anything Theo’s had, fear lacing it like the purest drug. Theo finds himself counting out of habit - _three, four, five_ \- head spinning with the too too good of it. He’d wondered over the years what it would be like to drink terror-laced blood after a hunt, in dark private moments where his brain conjured up the ugliest desires it could just so Theo could exorcise them. It disgusts him, even now that he’s had it. Fear pumps sweet blood through the heart, Boris was right, and it’s too fucked up to want. Instead of chasing the high of his life, Theo rips his teeth out, leaving behind a mess of marred skin and blood he’s been taught not to, and backs away. 

“What is wrong?” Boris asks, his brows furrowing. Reeve is still alive underneath him, though weak, but Boris keeps him pinned firmly nonetheless. Theo shakes his head, pressing his hands to his bloody mouth. “Theo.” 

He can’t do it, he can’t put another death on his hands. He knows he doesn’t believe in an eye for an eye, regardless of who it is, he knows he can’t spend the rest of his life with that on his conscience, if the rest of his life spans centuries or just into next week. It’s one thing to watch men die before him, but another entirely to kill them, to take their lives instead of leaving them to fate. It’s not Theo’s fate to kill again, that’s his choice. 

“Let him go,” Theo says, and Boris searches Theo’s face before he does - whatever he’s found there gives him permission to unclench his hands from Reeve’s chest and mouth and shuffle his feet backwards. 

Reeve falls over himself running for the door, but none of that matters. Theo backs up until he hits the wall, his knees giving out until he slides down onto the floor. Boris kneels before him, doesn’t ask him why, maybe because he understands, or if he doesn’t, he doesn’t care. Theo’s head rests back against the wall, his neck exposed, unguarded, his forearms draped over each of his propped knees.

“You knew it was him all along. Because you were trying to pull something on him.”

Boris’ jaw works before he admits, “Yes.”

“Why?”

“For you,” Boris says, which is just what Theo thought he would say, which is what Boris has been saying for years. “He found me first, tried to pull the same shit, Vermeer from Boston, lost for decades. Too good to pass up opportunity to make him pay.”

“Would you have told me if I hadn’t found out?”

“Would you have wanted to know?”

Theo lets silence speak for him because he doesn’t know if his answer is yes or no, so he’ll let Boris take whichever one he wants to hear. He lets Boris reach out and thumb away blood that’s been smeared onto his chin, watching closely as Boris sucks his thumb clean. 

“It’s all gone. Everything’s been taken from me. My family, my business, everything that matters. What do I have left?”

Boris looks away from him, his eyes catching on the old sunburned scar that runs across the back of Theo’s hand and up his fingers. “You will always have me.”

Theo leaves unsaid, _what if I don’t want you_. He’s been quick to anger for half a decade thinking of Boris, but where it used to fuel him, it now just makes him tired. He knows from the look on his face that Boris hears it anyway, that same carefully blank look he’d had in Vegas. Theo was haunted only well after the fact by the way he’d told Boris to his face that he didn’t have any friends. 

“I am sorry, Potter. Really, truly.”

Theo just nods. Boris thinks everything he does for Theo is done with love, and maybe it is, because Boris has only known a twisted version of it from his twisted childhood, adulthood, and death. He’s always tried to make it right, but he wouldn’t have had to if he hadn’t gotten it so wrong to begin with. 

On the plane from Antwerp to New York, Theo had taken stock of the new truths of this afterlife, the first truth being he’ll have to start over some day, to cut ties with Hobie and Pippa and the Barbours and every small habit and every familiar place that formed the sum of his parts just to avoid suspicion. He just hadn’t expected it to come so soon, without warning, without permission, but he should have known better than to think he could ever plan for it, such is his life. The only thing left on his list of things he wouldn’t have to remove from himself out of necessity is Boris - but he’d done that first thing, by choice.

He thinks he’s been playing at being a human, but really he’s just been playing at being Theodore Decker, unable to shed any layers of his trauma and move along unburdened. Pippa had seen the truth of him - that he’d carried the Met and the painting and the highway leaving Las Vegas and the bullet lodged in his stomach around with him so stubbornly, hoarding each of them like prized possessions, his arms so full and legs so weak each step he takes threatens to topple him over. She found a way to move on, by taking off the costume, by refusing to play at being the Pippa she thought she should be and evolving. 

If he collapsed under the weight, only Boris could have held him up, only Boris has held him up, dragging him to safety, pushing him to survive. But he wouldn’t collapse if he could drop everything he’s been carrying at his feet, find a way to step over them, find a way to move on. He can’t have nothing left if he carries everything. And he can’t move on as who he is.

Boris kisses him on the sidewalk outside Reeve’s building, his lips pressing against Theo’s like a statement, hands on either side of Theo’s face like he means to keep him from running again. Without a bag or Popchik clutched firmly at his sides, Theo answers with a hand to his waist, a brief intimacy gone the moment Boris leans back. 

Maybe they deserve each other, a matched set, but forgiveness feels impossible, an insurmountable task, an immovable object. Boris has yet to earn it, and Theo knows this is goodbye, which means Boris will stop trying to. Theo can think of few things worse to happen to him at this tipping point. Because knows what he owes Boris in return - Theo will never be able to thank him for saving his life, in any other way than to simply keep living, catastrophic as it’ll be. 

Boris walks away without a word, turning the collar of his coat up against the cold before jamming his hands into his pockets. Theo only gives him a one block head start.

\----

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading. if you need me, i'm [here.](https://putanauhere.tumblr.com/post/188629517815/sunlight-sunlight-sunlight-the-goldfinch)


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